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Mapping Mental Representations With Free Associations: A Tutorial Using the R Package associatoR
Samuel Aeschbach1,2, Rui Mata2, Dirk U Wulff1,2
1Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
Journal of Cognition
|January 13, 2025
Summary
Free association analysis reveals how people mentally represent complex concepts like risk and sustainability. This method, using the R package associatoR, offers insights for researchers and policymakers into societal understanding.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Computational Social Science
- Psychological Research Methods
Background:
- Understanding public perception of key concepts like risk, sustainability, and intelligence is crucial for researchers and policymakers.
- Current methods for assessing these perceptions are limited, leaving an underexplored avenue for deeper insights.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce and demonstrate the utility of the R package 'associatoR' for collecting, processing, mapping, and comparing free association responses.
- To provide a methodological framework for analyzing mental representations using free association data.
- To explore the application of natural language processing and large language models in understanding these representations.
Main Methods:
- Utilized free association tasks to gather data on mental representations.
- Employed the R package 'associatoR' for data management and analysis.
- Applied natural language processing techniques, including embeddings from large language models, to analyze response structures.
Main Results:
- Demonstrated the capability of 'associatoR' to effectively collect and analyze free association data.
- Showcased how free association analysis can uncover the structure of mental representations across different groups.
- Highlighted the potential of this approach in understanding how both humans and machines conceptualize complex issues.
Conclusions:
- Free association analysis is a powerful and underexplored method for mapping mental representations.
- 'associatoR' provides a robust tool for researchers to implement this methodology.
- This approach offers valuable insights into public understanding of critical social and technological topics.
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